Isa 65:17-25, Acts 10:34-43, Luke 24:1-12
Easter Day, 20 April 2025
Truro Cathedral

 

If, for a couple of days, you were given all the tools and all the authority you needed to rebuild this world, so that it was as good as it can be, what would you do?

If you had the power to create the perfect world, what would it be like?

We just heard the prophet Isaiah’s spirit-inspired answer to that question – you might like to look at it in your orders of service again.

In the perfect world that Isaiah describes, which he says God is going to bring, there will be no need for tears; childhood mortality rates will be zero and none of the causes of early death will exist any more; no cancer, heart disease or multiple sclerosis – everyone will lead a full, healthy and active life.

Communities will be strong, and largely self sufficient, without need for the chemically driven intensive farming that destroys soil and biodiversity. Good, fulfilling work will be available for everyone and workers will not be exploited or treated unjustly.

Everyone will have decent housing, the scourge of modern slavery will be a thing of the past, as will war and violence. Such will be the close presence of God that prayer, especially the prayer that comes from desperate need, will no longer be necessary; God will be available and intimately present.

And even creation will be at peace – wolves and lambs will co-exist, lions and oxen too. And the snake, that representative of temptation and evil, will be in its right place, never again to whisper false promises into the hearts of humans.

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it.

But that world is a long, long way away from this world, isn’t it. Like an unattainable fantasy or an impossible dream.

In the gospel we just heard, the women are at the empty tomb and we’re told they were ‘perplexed’. The word translated ‘perplexed’ literally means, ‘without a way’, or ‘lost’. And perhaps it feels as if there is no way to get from this world, with all it’s violence and injustice, to the world Isaiah describes. And sometimes we may well be lost in thinking it’s even possible.

I want to tell you this Easter Day – that world is a real world. The description that Isaiah gives, and which you can find over and over again throughout the bible, is no fantasy, and it is not a dream. It’s true. In fact, in some ways it is more true than the things we think are true, here in our everyday life; more real than the world we think of as real.

Because this vision, and the others like it in the bible, are what life in and with God is like. And as we hear and read it, we can sense what Isaiah is inviting us to consider, can’t we. A world in which humanity and creation are whole, in which life is fulfilling and community strong; in which there is plenty for all, but no more than is needed; in which God walks with his people and everything is at peace.

And that is no fantasy; that is what life with God is like – and it’s real. It’s real today even as we sit here in this cathedral.

Because that world, in which everything is as it should be, is what we call ‘heaven’.

We think of heaven as a place somewhere off beyond the clouds, which we get to go to when we die – we hope. But heaven isn’t far away, and it isn’t the end of a road – like we live this life and then move on to the next life. On almost every page of the bible, heaven is real and close – close enough for us to reach out and touch. It’s what every word Jesus says and every action that he does is telling us. God is with us; heaven is here; God’s reality has come close.

And it’s in Jesus Christ, risen from death, that this world and that world – the ‘real’ that we know, and the ‘real’ that is life with God – are fully and completely united. It is in Jesus Christ, who is The Way, that we discover how to get from here to there, or perhaps more accurately, how ‘there’ can get to ‘here’.

Because Easter is heaven on earth.

You might have heard the phrase ‘thin places’ – you may well know some thin places; there are lots of them in Cornwall. A ‘thin place’ is how the ancient Celtic Christians described places where the gap between heaven and earth – between our reality and God’s reality – feels thinner than usual; they’re places where there is a sense of something hard to describe, but holy or sacred comes close; places where God’s presence seems fuller or more real. Maybe you know somewhere like that.

Here’s what poet Kenneth Steven says about thin places:

Is this place really nearer to God?

Is the wall thin between our whispers

And his listening? I only know

The world grows less and less –

I am not sure whether there is no time here

Or more time, whether the light is stronger

Or just easier to see. That is why

I keep returning, thirsty, to this place

That is older than my understanding,

Younger than my broken spirit.

Maybe you know somewhere like that.

And the empty tomb is the thinnest of thin places – so thin that there is nothing left to separate heaven and earth; nothing left between God’s reality and the world we live in. It’s like a wide open doorway that has been thrown open between that world Isaiah described and this world, a door through which the justice, healing and wholeness of heaven comes pouring through. And it’s a doorway that can never be closed.

And as a result there are resurrection thin places everywhere – the holy spaces where ‘the light is stronger, and easier to see’; and there are also thin ways of being, thin people and thin communities. Anything and anyone in whom heaven – that world that Isaiah described – can be seen and known is a thin place; a doorway to heaven.

The King shared his Easter message with the nation a few days ago. In it he quoted one of the great passages from the bible – from 1 Corinthians 13 – ‘There are three virtues that the world still needs’, he wrote ‘faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love’.

Faith and hope and love. Above all, those three, are the signs of heaven on earth. It was faith, hope and love that poured in through the doorway of the empty tomb, and which still pour through today. Which means that wherever they are seen – wherever you see faith, hope and love at work – you’re in heaven; and wherever you are faithful, hopeful and loving, you are being heaven.

Jesus’ resurrection wasn’t a miraculous event designed to show us that God is amazing, or that Jesus was the real deal. Jesus’ resurrection is the point at which heaven and earth are united, in which God’s world, as described by Isaiah, becomes one with this world. And that unification can never be undone; the doorway opened by the empty tomb will never be closed until the day comes when Isaiah’s vision is fully here. 

And while we wait, we each have a choice.

We might say, as most of the disciples did when they were first told that the tomb was empty, and that heaven was pouring through onto earth, that it’s ‘an idle tale’; that it’s a fantasy or an impossible dream; that there is ‘no way’ for that to happen.

Or, like Peter, we can decide that, however strange and unlikely, it’s true. And we can choose to look into the empty tomb, the doorway to heaven, a place so thin that there is nothing left to hold it back, and through which faith, hope and love are pouring. And if we do that, if we take that risk, we’ll find that life can never be the same. We’ll find ourselves in a new reality – in which this world and that world; the reality of our existence here and the glorious call of heaven, are connected. In which faith, hope and love flow freely into a needy world.

And then, like Peter, we will ‘go home amazed’, called to be a thin place ourselves; called to build thin communities; called to work in faith, hope and love for the world that Isaiah describes; the world for which Jesus lived and died and lived again.

I wonder which choice will you make this Easter….I wonder what kind of world you’ll build as a result.

Happy Easter and God bless